Feedback On My Portfolio/Advice

Hello, I’ve been struggling to find any real job opportunities, and I can’t exactly pin point why that is.

I have experience with backend/frontend/fullstack, and have quite a few projects up on my github
(github/jddelia).

I feel like my region may be a problem, but I’d like you guys to take a look at my resume, and give me some advice on what I could improve.

My portfolio is at jdeliaportfolio .netlify .com/

Thanks for the feedback!

Do you have a personal website where you showcase your projects?
If not I think you should do that. Also just continue applying and learning. If you focus on making your online presence good, then you will receive offers, User the social media well; LinkedIn, and Twitter.

I do, but since I’m a new account, I can’t post links.

Fill in the spaces of the link below:

https:// jdeliaportfolio .netlify. com/

Thanks for the feedback.

It looks good but can you change those projects into cards?
That would look better. Also use some css to shadow the card when a mouse is hovered over it.
Play around with a lot of CSS and also some jQuery if possible

Sounds good; thanks!

Great!
Keep me updated and all the best

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the links to your projects are nearly invisible on that particular color background… at least to me.

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Okay, I’m going to be a bit harsh here, but I hope I’m being fair. (Caveat: I didn’t check out your React Native App, so perhaps you progressed). The overriding problems I see with your work are: accessibility/design and UX. I didn’t even look at whether the code was clean, and whether you avoid antipatterns because nothing interested my brain.

  • Portfolio:
    • Design: As others have said, your color scheme and font choice have made it hard to see. Thicken up those letters, make the colors more contrasting, and made some buttons/cards. Look at a smartphone screen for inspiration. Apps are big visual icons, and even the title fonts (app names below them) though small, are thick.
    • UX: We are primarily visual creatures. The design issue above show that you’re not engaging the visual cortex (of which there are SEVEN major regions, comprising a whopping ONE-THIRD of your cerebral cortex). The point of your portfolio is to get people to contact you, yet your page layout doesn’t put that front-and-center, rather, that’s below the fold. In addition, there’s no color-contrasting button saying “Get In Touch!”. I saw your main.css file, and noticed you have a linear gradient between colors that are so similar I couldn’t tell there was a gradient. I picked the first one and found a nice flat color contrasted sufficiently using WebAIM’s color picker. You don’t have to use the one I stored in the permalink, but you should use this tool to make your UI pop to guide the user’s hand into doing what you want.

With that theory out of the way, project-specific critiques along these two lines follow:

MindRight:

  • Design:
    • Same pale-on-pale color scheme with thin fonts.
    • Firefox Developer Tools Mobile View shows you have some problems with responsivity: The stoplight buttons get tiny, and your title button exceeds the width of the viewport
  • UX:
    • Why do you even have a splash page? I could understand if the "About information was on it, and the “MindRight” button pulsed, tempting people to push it (far better than saying “click me”).
    • You don’t have any quotes for “Perseverance,” which is quite ironic :P. Put some in, or get rid of that “theme” in the dropdown.
    • You have a series of “stoplight” buttons with no explanation of what they do except the green one, which has a tooltip. Get rid of them, and consider changing the green button to a free fontawesome icon - such as these ones for “writing”
    • The “Mindright” title button is still clickable even when it does nothing, like after the initial splash screen. Disable it?

TaskCrusher:

  • Design: BETTER. Thicker fonts, higher contrast
  • UX:
    • Giant button on a splash screen, does nothing when clicked. Login page takes an unnecessary click to get to it - you can timeout its appearance if you want to get fancy.
    • Sign up to a portfolio project? Noped right out of there. If you want a demonstration playground, make a fake user account, and have the login default to that, reloading from a default “pre-built” set of tasks.

Stopwatch:

  • Design: Only looks good on tablet viewports - cut off at mobile, too spread-out on my 4k.
  • UX: Holy hell. A stopwatch that doesn’t do the one thing a stopwatch is supposed to - record a time interval. Clicking stop resets the counter, it doesn’t stop it. Real stopwatches have stop/start and reset. You should be able to resume the countup from stopped by pressing start again. Reset should clear. Fancier stopwatches even show lap/split times. I would put those in if I were you. I’d make it respond to keyboard events, too. I’d also give a hundredths-of-a-second panel that you can optionally hide (because 1 second for your UI to respond to “start” being clicked is way too long).

React Instruments:

  • Design: basic, but not terrible. Responsive!
  • UX: Good. I could play different instruments at different notes simultaneously, since your implementation clearly lets you play temporally-overlapping notes.

Lots of “toy problem” projects isn’t a great look for a portfolio. If you were to develop one of these, it would serve you much better. The best advice I ever got was to find a pain point that you or someone close to you has, and build something to help with that. If someone else, you need access to that person so you can get feedback, and iterate outwards from your MVP - minimum viable product. You could build out your music player to an app that lets people select buttons that represent (instrument + note), so they could play an ensemble on their phone, but I don’t know what pain point that solves. The MindRight comes closest to that, but it needs to be so much better. Perhaps the app version in the Play store does that (I don’t have an Android, so I can’t tell). If it does, maybe you can re-port it to the web?

I know I can be harsh, but if you are having difficulty, sunshine and rainbows isn’t what you need. Best of luck, and keep us updated with what you do decide to build.

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Thanks for the feedback!

Mindright - The issue with the splash page has more to do with how React Router worked with Github pages. The reason you didn’t get quotes for perseverance is because of the logic. It shuffles 5 quotes, and allows you to filter from those five; if one titled perseverance isn’t of the initial 5, you can’t filter it. That’s a known bug I have to fix.

TaskCrusher - The login was practice implementing login/authentication.

I appreciate your feedback, I need to go back and upgrade those app. I’ve mainly just been trying to do as many projects as possible, without going back to older ones. Thanks.

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I would work on one non-tutorial project, and make it fully-featured. Whatever it is, max it out. I don’t think most of them are helping your portfolio in the current state.

Those were all non-tutorial. That’s what I was going for with TaskCrusher.

I will have to improve them though.

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Taskcrusher did have the best design, but I would caution you that a “to-do list” is a bit of a cliché, as there are many tutorials with it. If you are going to go ahead with Taskcrusher, I would still recommend that you have an account just for the demo.

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Thanks again for taking the time to review my work.

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I don’t understand how some app work and what they want me to do. Also, you should have a image and small description for each project.

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